Essays & Reviews

Featuring former CIA director and agents, the documentary discussed how CIA planned to assassinate Patrice Lumumba. The operation included a payout to Mobutu, a CIA operative. Even though Mobutu rejected the $25, 000 payout, he carried out the order to murder Lumumba.

In his latest film, "Minority Report," director Steven Spielberg portrays a policy of "preemptive action" gone wild in the year 2054. But we don't have to peer into the future to see what harm faulty intelligence and the loss of our moral compass can do. U.S. policies during the Cold War furnish many tragic examples. One was U.S. complicity in the overthrow and murder of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.

In the past month or so I have noted several references to Adichie’s ‘The Danger of a Single Story’. I have received e-mails from admirers of the Orange Prize for Women’s Writing winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pointing me to a video of the Nigerian writer talking about her riveting ‘new’ idea. Facebook friends have posted the video on my wall. Others have twitted it, and some have referenced it in responding to book reviews elsewhere. One e-mailer suggested that I MUST get in touch with Chimamanda Adichie to get the text of her presentation and publish it in Sentinel Literary Quarterly because, in his opinion, ‘The Danger of a Single Story’ was “so illuminating that it would change the West’s view of Africa forever.” Intrigued, I dropped everything I was doing and went over to Ted.com to see the video for myself.

As a fan of the work of Mahmood Mamdani, I was shocked to read his commencement speech at the University of Johannesburg following his honorary doctoral degree on May 25, 2010. The speech has just been published by Pambazuka online with the title, ‘Beware of Bigotry: Free Speech and the Zapiro Cartoons’. The speech showed the dismay of Mamdani to find that his favourite cartoonist in the Mail & Guardian newspaper had followed the example of Danish and European newspapers of the left and the right to publish a cartoon of the Holy Prophet Mohammed without sensitivity to the concerns of Muslims who would find such offensive.

Let me start by saying that this opinion by Gates represents an advancement on his PBS series in the sense that he did not say a single word about reparations in his six hours of documentary and he was called out on that. Now that he has commented on the issue, he has taken another step forward by limiting his conspiracy theory of slavery to the elites and not to all Africans as appeared to be the case in the Wonders when he asked ordinary Africans what it felt like to see a descendant of one of those that they supposedly sold long ago. These baby steps forward appear to be too little too late especially because he also took massive leaps backward by blaming Africans while calling for an end to the blame-game.